The final guest of the Spring 2025 HistCon Speaker Series will be one of HistCon’s own, alumnus Isaac Blacksin! He will be joining us on Monday, June 2nd, to give his talk “Making Death Meaningful: On Journalism’s Humanitarian Desire” at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 420. If you are unable to make it in person, you can register to attend virtually via Zoom.

Lauded journalism from the 2016-17 battle for Mosul, Iraq, revealed gross underestimates of US-caused civilian harm from anti-Islamic State operations, exemplifying journalism’s ability to “speak truth to power.” Yet in questioning official death tallies, journalists failed to challenge the rationale offered for this harm: an accidental exception or necessary excess to justified violence. By focusing on individuated and corporeal suffering, by categorizing violence as lawful or extreme, and by attending to immanent violence – rather than the structures perpetuating violence – as the central problem of war, journalism emphasized the moral dynamics of militarism while mystifying its political logic. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in and around Mosul during the battle, this talk assesses war reportage in its contemporary humanitarian mode. It tracks a transformation in the journalistic representation of war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent, with implications for popular understandings of violence from Ukraine to Palestine.

Isaac Blacksin is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Conflicted: Making News from Global War (Stanford University Press, 2024) and co-editor of a recent issue of boundary 2 on the life and thought of Norman O. Brown. Isaac’s work – on violence, fantasy, and the politics of representation – appears in journals such as Public Culture, Media, War & Conflict, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

After the talk, all attendees are invited to continue the conversation over dinner and drinks at Abbott Square at 5:30pm.